How to Add an LED Navigation Light to the Bow of Your Boat

Do any boating at night or in poor visibility, you've really got to have good navigation lights My boat is somewhat old, and we've got cracked and crazed lenses on this, and this light really isn't up to snuff, so we're going to replace it. Things have moved on a bit since this light was fitted. I'm going to fit a modern LED light. If you look inside, you can see there's an LED array. There's no bulb to blow. It's almost a fit and forget item. Some people might think that you can just replace the existing bulb in this light with an LED light, but that you can't do because it's unlikely to comply with the U.S. Coast Guard regulations. A navigation light has to have 2-mile visibility. Just replacing the bulb isn't going to work. You've really got to replace the whole fitting.

So before I actually start doing any electrical work, I'm going to make sure that the battery is switched off. I've previously turned that off, so now I can go ahead and remove the old light. So, I've removed the old light, I've cut the cables. Here's the new light. I'm just going to connect it up now. I've made one connection for the negative. I'm going to make up the positive connection now. So, with the two connections made, now what I'm going to do is feed them back down below the deck and then mount the lamp in position. Place the new light on the boat. I've drilled the holes for the screws, and now I'm going to put in the first screw. The first screw goes through the center of the light so that I can screw that down onto the boat, and then we can make sure the light is directly fore and aft so that we're not showing the wrong sectors. I've lined it up and I'm just putting in the final screw now. I want it to be tight but not too tight. We don't want to crack the casing. And then with that, we can snap the cover on. So there you have it. The project took me about half an hour, I got rid of the old junky light, replaced it with a new LED light. I never have to worry about replacing the bulbs ever again. Looks good, looks classy.